A technical failure at Cloudflare caused widespread service interruptions on Tuesday, affecting access to ChatGPT, social media platform X and several online gaming services. The company, which provides security and traffic management tools used across the internet, said it was working to identify the source of the disruption.

Users across Canada, including in Metro Vancouver and parts of Alberta, reported repeated 500 error messages and an inability to load web-based tools that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. The outage also limited access to Cloudflare’s own dashboard and API, which many small and mid-sized businesses depend on for managing website performance.

Cloudflare initially stated it had begun recovery efforts but later clarified that engineers were still investigating the underlying problem. The incident highlights how dependent digital services have become on a small number of infrastructure providers that play a critical role in the reliability of online communication and commerce.

Internet outages of this scale often carry ripple effects for schools, workplaces and public services that use cloud-based platforms, a challenge that B.C. and Alberta organizations have faced in past national and global service disruptions. No timeline for full restoration was immediately provided.